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For some time I have been looking for a good way to let my computer discover the Windows network and mount shares on demand. After trying the kioslaves in the desktop of my choice (KDE) and the FUSE programs Fusesmb and SmbNetFs, I was not really satisfied. There had to be a way to let my computer discover all the workgroups/domains, the hosts and the shares, and mount a share on a hosts on demand.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) appears to be polishing up its legal sabers over possible violations of the General Public License (GPL) by Microsoft.

Sometime by mistakes all package file permissions get changed and you need to restore file permission. For example a shell script or some sort of corruption could change the permissions for packages (installed files), it may be necessary to reset them. For example a long time ago my shell script run chmod and chown commands on /usr and changed the permission. Luckily rpm command can reset package permission. Sun Solaris pkg command and IBM can also reset permissions. How to: Linux reset the permissions of the installed rpm packages

Conglomerate aims to be an XML editor that everyone can use. Conglomerate is perfect open source tool for XML manipulation and editing. It is suitable for fast DocBook XML creating from text files. Great tool for everyday office and home work.

Around 560,000 German students plus thousands of staff at 33 German universities will now be supported by Linux systems from Novell. The Federal State of North Rhine Westphalia has selected Novell to support the critical IT infrastructure systems at the universities in its region.

ASIC vendor Micronas has introduced a hardware/software development kit for a small camera claimed capable of streaming D1 (DVD) resolution video over IP (Internet protocol) networks. The "Mini-IP Camera" kit is based on Micronas's Cypher ESN7108A SoC (system-on-chip), and runs Linux on the SoC's MIPS core. The Mini-IP camera design targets surveillance and other types of monitoring applications. It is said to accept audio and video input from attached sensors, compress it in real time, and send it out using single- or multi-cast Internet protocols such as RTSP.

Leapfrog Enterprises, maker of children's learning toys and electronics, is in the process of ramping up its Internet operations to serve a new series of Web-aware educational products. At the same time, the company's best-of-breed infrastructure planning strategies are leading the company in the direction of open-source software.

This week on Open News: The Desktop Linux Survey Results, Gates Picks Up The Red Phone For OOXML, No More Get The FUD, Palm Foleo Is Delayed, Goobuntu Is Confirmed, and Windows As A Punishment.

It seems like just yesterday that the GNOME Project got its start, but actually it was a decade ago that Miguel de Icaza got the ball rolling. While de Icaza has largely focused his time on Mono recently, the GNOME community has kept making progress. To get some perspective on GNOME's history, I spoke to de Icaza and longtime GNOME contributor and GNOME Foundation board member Jeff Waugh.

How often have you thrown up your hands in disgust at the poor quality of documentation for an open source project? Wouldn’t it be nice if someone put together a documentation coverage tool that worked like test coverage tools? Well, you’re in luck—dcov is here (at least for Ruby code). dcov is still pretty immature , but it’ showing a lot of promise. It’s already capable of verifying that each module, class, and method of your code is documented. The upcoming release adds coverage checking for each parameter to a method

We all know (or are about to find out) that the world of Open Source Software isn’t the same world as proprietary developers live in. OSS coders may or may not be paid to develop the projects they work on, regardless, it’s all about your contributions, how good you are and how well you’re perceived in the OSS community. One’s reputation in the community is a valuable item. When everything you code or produce is freely available for the world to see and especially your peers to review and (ahem, constructively) criticize, the stakes are pretty high.

Last school year, I worked as a technology coordinator for a rural high school in Illinois. In an attempt to save the school some money, I introduced OpenOffice.org, GIMP, Firefox, and Thunderbird. Linux was also installed on a few desktop PCs and a couple of servers. Ubuntu was the Linux distribution selected. OpenSUSE, Debian, Fedora, and Slackware were also given trials on the servers. The open source software and operating systems were met with some acceptance, some resistance, and some skepticism.

Currently, a few developers on Team-XBMC have begun the porting of XBMC to Linux (and OpenGL using the SDL toolkit). The goal is for this to become a full port of XBMC with all the features and functions that are available on the Xbox version of XBMC (with the exception of Xbox exclusive functionality as Trainers, launching Xbox Games, and such). XBMC is a media player for the original Xbox game-console and is free and open source software, distributed under the GNU General Public License.

About 6 months ago I was having a conversation with my roommate Beth, talking about her aging Dell laptop. She was considering getting a desktop machine to use as her primary workhorse for her up and coming graduate student immersion. I thought a bit, and said "Hey, I could probably get you something decent. We could even make this an interesting experiment. Tell you what, I'll get you a machine, but it'll run Linux. Up for it?". "Sure!", and we were off...

In the comments to the article I wrote about running the 64-bit version of Ubuntu Feisty Fawn on a Gateway MX7626, I added that my friend who owns the laptop had “upgraded” to Gutsy Gibbon Tribe 4 to try and fix a problem with intermittent sound under Feisty. The initial upgrade did work and her sound functioned properly. I talked to her again last night and she is giving up on running Ubuntu beta software and is going back to Fiesty.

Linux will power about 31 percent of all smartphones sold in 2012, and by then will have shipped in 331 million devices, says ABI. The research firm forecasts 75 percent CAGR (compound annual growth rate) for Linux in smartphones through 2012, making it the fastest-growing OS in the sector. Linux is benefiting from growing support in the handset OEM community, most notably Motorola, but also Nokia with less traditional types of devices aimed at mobile broadband applications.

From the flames, some of you seem to be a bit interested in the new open sauce flavours floating around. One more go at the sauces, and we will see if you like it. Or not. You can flame, or ask for more. Here goes. The three victims for this round of testing are Arklinux 2007.1, Damn Small Linux 4.0, and Sabayon Linux 3.4.

Governments looking to migrate to open source software (OSS) will need to ramp up their internal skills base, according to Gartner analyst Andrea Di Maio. Di Maio said that over time organisations had become reliant on external skills in their operations. One of the primary challenges for governments moving to open source would be the need to re-instate internal skills. "In moving to open source you can't rely on external skills and [before the move] you will need to assess whether you will be able to ramp up the the required level."

Sun has announced the UltraSPARC T2, which it has dubbed the world's fastest commodity microprocessor. As a general-purpose processor, the UltraSPARC T2 also provides support for the massively threaded, open source Solaris operating system and other realtime operating systems, as well as future versions of Ubuntu Linux. Sun plans to release source code for the UltraSPARC T2 processor to the OpenSPARC community and the UltraSPARC T2 processor design to the open source community through the GPL license.

Blue GNU interviews Alexandre Oliva to learn about Free Software Foundation - Latin America. After a bit of a stuttering start, the FSFLA is definitely well under way and making strong progress.